


Small, Uncharted Star

by Lessandra



Category: Jumanji (1995), Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Fix-It, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 13:50:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21272084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lessandra/pseuds/Lessandra
Summary: It’s not a vengeance against a fucking video game. She is not making plans to go to the jungles of Peru and to trek Patagonia in order to hack away at its wilderness, at its deadliness, and scream back in its face for making her afraid.It isn’t an escape, either. She is definitely not running away from anything, or anyone.





	Small, Uncharted Star

**Author's Note:**

> I had to get this out of my system before the sequel came out and ruined it for me.
> 
> (This works uses a custom skin, and I have no idea how nightmarish it looks without.)

* * *

I would have loved him in any era, in any dark age;  
as it is, this afternoon, late in the twentieth century,  
I sit on a chair in the kitchen with my keys in my lap,  
pressing the black button on the answering machine  
over and over, listening to his message, thinking  
even in the farthest future, in the most distant universe,  
I would have recognized this voice,  
refracted as it would be,  
like light from some small, uncharted star.

(As It Is — _**Dorianne Laux**_)

* * *

She makes up reasons in her head: neat justifiable explanations that she tells people about her sudden plan to go backpacking.

Calls it _“stepping out of my comfort zone”_ (if only), and _“exercising my teenage feminist rebellion here”_ (not really). Tells people that she needs to “find herself”—that’s the saying that gets overused the most, right? It sounds like a deflection, but that’s, perhaps, the most honest one: she doesn’t know how other people go about losing themselves in the first place, but she has certainly been burying the real Bethany Walker under a thick layer of a pointless Instagram feed.

She tells her parents that it’s an experience. That not many have the guts, or the financial means, or the understanding parents to do this, and they wouldn’t deny their daughter this, would they? There won’t be very many opportunities for her to take a year off like that after this.

She tells her parents and the school counselor (because they make her see one) that it will give her skills for life; and she can get college credit by doing it anyway; and that it’s been scientifically proven that it’s beneficial to let the brain recharge and refresh before delving into higher academia; that she will meet new people and make important connections; that nothing in a classroom will teach her about the real world how this will.

There are a dozen of arguments and rationales for what this is, if it’s acting out, or being a modern woman.

But here is what it’s definitely, _definitely_ not:

It’s not a vengeance against a fucking video game. She is not making plans to go to the jungles of Peru and to trek Patagonia in order to hack away at its wilderness, at its deadliness, and scream back in its face for making her afraid.

It isn’t an escape, either. She is definitely not running away from anything, or _anyone_.

——o——

“You want to come in?” Alex asks awkwardly as they are standing in the middle of the road, stilted and unsure.

He looks like a ghost of the game, like a bad joke: less than an hour ago they were stuck in Jumanji, in unwieldy bodies of grown men and women, and he was the only one who was still young. Now, they are outside, and themselves again, and it is he who looks old. But doesn’t. Looks _trapped_ in an older body, like they all were. Looks sad.

(Maybe that’s what she wants him to look.)

“Wouldn’t that be weird?” she asks instead. “Four strange teenagers at your family house?”

“Right,” he says, visibly deflating.

“We should just hang out,” Spencer interjects. “Go to a coffee shop. Talk.” He closes his mouth then, still a little unsure of it, of himself. But then the others shrug and nod, sort of agreeably, and he nods too, reassured.

Bethany doesn’t move. Looks at them, then looks at Alex expectantly. Or maybe warily. Or maybe a little hurt. That he’s _this_, instead of whatever she’s been building herself up to. Great fucking Expectations, indeed.

Alex gives a jerky nod. It’s all unbearably weird, that he’s an adult, and they don’t fit together snugly anymore, not at all.

“I can’t. Right now.” He says. “I just arrived, I have to—” he nods towards his house, or his father’s house, who knows anymore now, makes a vague gesture. “Later today though?”

“You know _Donna’s_?” Spencer asks dubiously. “Does it even exist anymore?” He looks unsure again, but this time—of everything else. What else may have changed.

Alex chuckles, because he gets it, and nods, “Yeah. Yeah, I know it. It’s where it’s always been.”

In his lifetime, it stood there since 1996 at least. If it has changed places in theirs they don’t know, but they have to assume it didn’t. Not enough reasons for it to have gone anywhere else.

——o——

At four o’clock, as decided, they all gather up there. Alex is already waiting for them, drumming his fingers across the table anxiously.

“I didn’t expect to see you guys again,” is the first thing he says.

“What? We said we’d be here,” Spencer says, impossibly sincere.

“He means, not _ever_,” Fridge says flatly. He seems to be the only one understanding the gravity of this situation aside from Bethany. He really is a whole lot smarter than he pretends to be.

“We just got back today,” Martha chimes in helpfully.

“I’m… really glad, you guys,” Alex admits faintly, burying his expression into his coffee mug. “I thought. Well. If I got back, there was no reason for you to even find the game. I thought it would rewrite history, or something.”

He rubs his left hand, and Bethany looks at the dull gleam of his wedding band. Looks down and away and continues to contribute very little to the conversation. Has trouble looking at him, because that’s all she was doing before, was _looking_ at him, and expected to look at him here, and have _him_ look, and _see_ her. She was expecting a teenage boy, which Alex isn’t, and it turns out, he’s not here for her to look at, and she doesn’t feel stunning anymore, feels awkward and embarrassed instead.

“We should exchange phones!” Spencer says eagerly.

Alex chuckles. “I know what that means, now,” he points out wryly, and Bethany can’t help a smile.

He gives them his phone number. They all text him so he’d get theirs. Then Spencer starts talking about nothing. About everything.

They all need introductions; new ones. That he’s the gamer geek, and he’s thinking of going into computer sciences. That he’s known Fridge for years, and he might have screwed up his athletic scholarship a little bit, but he’s gonna fix it. That Martha’s the quiet one, and Bethany is, well, not. It’s only explainable now, in 2017, when he knows this world too.

Alex’s explanation is very stiff. He glosses over many details, but here’s who he is now, the classic modern man, wife and 2.5 kids, and he looks at Bethany as he’s saying all these wonderful horrible things.

_I want him to have a life,_ she told Martha, as he was lying on the ground, looking nothing like this man here. And he did. That is exactly what he went and did, and she hates herself for having the gall to fault him for that.

——o——

Quietly and unceremoniously and without any preamble she deletes her Instagram profile. It feels like somebody else took all those pictures. Somebody small, and afraid, and who cared about all the wrong things.

She creates a new page instead. For her future walkabout. Calls it _@titaniasoberon_, because, well Shakespeare; and ancient mythology; and she’s still Bethany fucking Walker, she’s never gonna be above an occasional faerie reference; but above all else, of course, because Dr. Sheldon. She’s doing it for the both of them. For herself, and for that part of her that’s him now, complete with the knowledge of teenage erections, and how to pee standing, and sweatiness, and not enough stamina, and too much extra body.

Spencer is the first person to follow her, almost immediately. He’s a tech-head, he’s always been plugged in no less than her. Lucinda is the 23rd to follow her, after Bethany has honestly stopped waiting. She quietly unfollows Bethany after a week, as their relationship slowly and silently disintegrates.

It’s a little unfair to her, probably, and Bethany tries her best, her earnest, to bring her friend up to speed. But they are in different headspaces now, and the incompatibility is honestly too exhausting. She doesn’t mean to give her old crowd a cold shoulder; she just lost the patience for performing anything that is even mildly uncomfortable in the name of social appeasements. She doesn’t owe those people anything.

It takes a week before Noah acts all interested again. She remembers, faintly, wanting his attention, the thought of it making her preen; she also doesn’t really remember it, and doesn’t know what to do with it now. They weren’t even steady; they weren’t anything. A high school notion of romance; two dumb kids “playing” at feelings and disappointing each other.

The power that she has over these boys? It’s a powerless kind of power. You dumb yourself down, and flash some teeth, and flash some cleavage, and you let them get a little more handsy than you find comfortable, but still play coy, although not enough to be bitchy. You’re a gift they want to unwrap, and you seem sophisticated, but never smarter than them, and always attainable. It’s a bad sort of a bargain, but it’s a safe spot in a high school hierarchy. Except she doesn’t want to play at this game anymore.

She looks at Noah now, and she has no idea what he wants out of life. She’s not even sure he ever thinks past tomorrow. She’s never thought about it before, about his lack of vision, blindsided by the fact that she always knew what _she_ wanted: she wanted to be successful. And a part of being successful is to date the most desirable boy in school.

Her new friends—her new family—they have always known what they wanted, too. Spencer wants to code video games, because that’s what he loves, and Spencer has always wanted to be _happy_. It’s a simple and endearing way of looking at things.

Martha has always wanted to be meaningful. Bethany doesn’t want to steal her thing, but on the other hand, who doesn’t want to be meaningful? She feels it acutely now. That it feels good to make a difference.

Fridge has always wanted to be excellent, because he’s a tall muscular black kid, and in today’s climate, tall black kids get too easily arrested, if not worse, unless they are twice as good as white kids, and thrice as quiet, four times as composed.

(Noah yells at her for being indifferent. For something as small as not engaging in his pushover flirting, for being suddenly uninterested in him. They end up in the principal’s office once again, this time no detention, and Mr. Bentley is firm on the subject, but the line of thinking is _boys will be boys_. When Fridge as much as raises his voice once, he gets detention again, because when he does it, it’s dangerous signs of future delinquency. Spencer is particularly livid about the whole situation, but Fridge quietly tells him just to be thankful that they could convince the Principal to reinstate Fridge to the team, provided he completes a lot more extra credit. He’s less daunted by the prospect now, after being kind of a bookworm in the game; plus, he has three study partners.)

As her friends make preparations to go to college, she makes preparations to go trekking, and snorkeling, and rafting. There are all these programs, she’s not about to go there all unprepared. She’s nothing if not organized.

She takes up sports. Has always looked good, but those were strict diets, because gym is sweaty and for angry women who work through their problems. She doesn’t really care about her waistline now. She burns most of what she eats, she figures, and she is an angry woman now, with problems, romantic and otherwise, and anyway, she’s got to be in shape to go backpacking. And she remembers all too well the lack of strength, the lack of speed, the lack of air. It’s both an homage and a prevention measure.

——o——

Back in 1996, in his bedroom, Alex quietly freaks out. Pats himself all over, and he’s back, _him_, his gangly teen self. Not ‘Seaplane’, just Alex Vreeke. It’s been twenty years, they told him softly, but it hasn’t been. There’s no passage of time in his body, and he jumps up from his bed and runs downstairs, feet banging loudly across the steps, thinking: what if the years have passed, but he hasn’t. His parents are sound asleep, and are perfectly confused when he wakes them. Their faces look like he remembers, has been remembering all this time. They are only mildly annoyed to have been woken; they’ve never lost him, never missed him. It’s the same day.

Back in his room, Alex can’t fall asleep. Takes the longest shower of his life, because, honestly, hot water, god’s gift to humanity, he nearly sobs with how much he’s missed it. And then does sob after all, covering his mouth and shuddering all over. He has made it.

In spite of everything, he has made it. Back to his body, his room, his year, alive; surrounded by all of his everything, all the pointless chachkies he has missed, like a fool, they don’t matter at all, but they were _him_, his life, his person, and he’s missed them anyway, for no reason that had to do with survival, but just for them, for the feel of it all, the senseless comfort.

In the bedroom, drying out, he stares at the _it_. The culprit. Still sitting on his bedstand. Jumanji. Hurriedly, he goes and unplugs his entire system, then tears the cartridge out, and wants to honestly flush it down the drain. Almost does, but his hand freezes over the toilet, and what he thinks of are: Spencer. Fridge. Martha. Bethany. Like he’s holding them in his hand.

The game needs to survive for them to play it. He has no earthly idea how, how he could possibly get it to them, or, better yet, _when_ to get it to them.

In that moment is the first time when he acutely misses them.

“How about we play the game I brought last night?” his dad will offer the next day.

Him and mom have brushed off the episode of the night as too many video games, _they are giving you night terrors, honey_. He doesn’t disabuse them of their notions.

Alex swallows past the sharp stab of panic in his gut and says nonchalantly, “Where did you get it, anyway, dad?”

“Eh. Found it on the beach. Thought somebody may have forgotten it. It was half-buried. Their loss.”

“I think somebody _tossed_ it,” Alex lies, hopefully convincingly. “It’s not very good, dad. You’re better off teaching me poker or something.”

His console is still sitting upstairs, unplugged, and he can’t even look at it anymore, or any of his games. Tries to figure out what to do with either, the system and the game, but keeps coming up short.

At least there are no more drums.

——o——

His parents nearly end up sending him to a shrink. That would have been a trip.

He can’t really explain anything of what happened to him. He _died_. Twice; horribly; in flames. Planes make him a little nauseous now, and frankly so does the outdoors in general. He gets rid of the console, and tells his parents that it went bust, but he doesn’t want a new one, he’ll focus on his studies. He has nightmares about things that do not exist in this day and age anymore. He has nightmares about things that do not exist in the real world at all.

It all really comes to a head a few weeks after his return. It’s evening; it’s summer. They’re all watching TV downstairs, and the window is open to let the breeze in. They have a table lamp on.

He notices an itch on his palm and swats it instinctively, and when he looks down, there was a mosquito sucking his blood out. The air seems to freeze solid around him and in his lungs, and he cannot take a breath. Instead he thinks he might throw up. He grips the couch, or tries to, but his fingers tingle until he can’t feel them at all, like they fell asleep. It isn’t even fear, he remembers that they can’t hurt him anymore almost immediately, but it’s instinct anyway.

“A panic attack,” a paramedic concludes later, because his parents got scared enough to call 911. Alex cannot explain to them what caused it.

“Are you being bullied at school?” his father asks him afterwards, in a tone that he deems sufficiently inviting, to show that he cares and he will take this seriously.

“No,” Alex exhales honestly. His school life is fairly uneventful to have any kind of detrimental impact.

“Is it too much stress?” his mother frets. “Choosing a college can be a very stressful time,” she clucks her tongue worriedly.

“School’s fine,” he says. He doesn’t have a good brush-off for them.

His mother sighs and looks at his father. “Maybe he should see a specialist,” she says.

“Gloria!” he protests indignantly.

“Well, first that nightmare that he woke us up in the middle of the night for, now this. Something’s going on.”

“He doesn’t need to see _anyone_,” his father shakes his head, frowning.

“I’m fine. Honestly,” Alex says quietly, and this one’s a lie, but what else can he do.

In the end, what happens instead is he sees an ad on TV, and it solves it for him. He did need to see someone. It just wasn’t a shrink.

——o——

In retrospect, it shouldn’t have taken him this long to make the connection. It’s so in his face, really, that he’s angry with himself for missing it. The footwear factory is, after all, the heart of the town’s life. They devote a whole week of lessons just to the Parrishes as the founders of the town. His father still remembers the old Sam Parrish lording over Brantford and hosting high-brow benefits. His son runs the ship a little differently.

Alex weasels his way into the _ParriShoes_ office under the guise of an earnest student, trying to write a piece for his paper on local history, bucking for extra credit. Alan Parrish is amenable enough to the prospect, and Alex is fitted into a short time slot to come and ask a couple of questions. He’s only got the one.

Alan Parrish looks nothing like Alex imagined. He isn’t sure what he was expecting, honestly. A room with animal heads hanging off the walls and a man standing there proudly in safari get-up. Someone like Van Pelt, someone like Bravestone. Or someone like him, a boy trapped in the jungle, cutting his name into the woodboards to remind himself that he’s still here, because he’s scared, because he misses his father.

Alan Parrish wears a plain suit and a mischievous but kind smile. When they show Alex in, he’s on the phone, talking profits, and numbers, and all kinds of business vernacular that Alex imagines he’ll understand with age, because he definitely understands none of it now. He smiles at Alex and indicates that he will be only a moment longer, and quickly wraps the call up.

“So. Nice to meet you, Alex,” he says, in that avuncular tone adults use to make kids feel more at ease.

“You’re Alan Parrish,” Alex says, his tongue tracing the name he has said in his head over and over again for weeks.

“That’s what it says on the plaque,” Alan agrees, tapping on his name on the desk.

“Right,” Alex nods, and feels tongue-tied, and like he’s sweating too much, and his stomach is twisting in knots, and like he’s in a flat spin over the sierra again.

Alan studies him curiously for a moment and motions for him to sit down. Asks, still in that too-warm voice, “Shouldn’t you need a notebook for this? A pen?”

Alex gulps. “I—” he starts, and stops, and starts again, “Do you?—” and stops again, and Alan waits patiently for him. “I came to ask you something,” he finally manages. “It’s not what you think. I wanted to—Have you ever heard the word… _‘jumanji’_?”

Alan’s face changes, smoothes over into something defensive. “Who are you?” he asks. His tone is no longer warm.

“Have you?” Alex asks again.

Alan takes too long to answer, and that silence is telling enough.

“It _is_ you,” Alex exhales. “I saw your name. Inside.”

Alan’s expression changes again. A mixture of surprise, and something dark. “You played the game?” he asks grimly.

“Yes.”

“Did you _finish_ it?” he demands with an urgency.

“Yes.”

Alan nods at that, relaxing just a fraction. Looks at his watch and shakes his head. “My assistant foolishly thought this was gonna be a quick interview for school credit.” Alex grimaces apologetically. “We can’t possibly fit this into my day. Not right _now_,” he adds firmly, when Alex is about to protest. “Come to my house later tonight, for dinner. Let’s say, eight o’clock. We’ll have a lot to talk about.”

——o——

The house intimidates Alex a little bit. It looks like it should be tended to by a butler, and a full staff. Instead, Alan Parrish opens the door himself. Looks even more casual in a pair of jeans and a sweater, even more non-threatening than before. Not at all like a man who could have possibly lived inside that bungalow. But his face is a mixture of excited and terrified, and Alex believes _that_, at least.

“Come on in. Come on in,” Alan ushers him in with a smile, and they make their way into the living room. A kind-looking woman is waiting for them there, and in his mind Alex knows she cannot _possibly_ be a shrink, those realms of his life do not overlap, but that’s his knee-jerk suspicion anyway, that she looks like one. He stops in his tracks and nearly backs up and glances over at Alan.

“Who are you?” he asks the woman.

“Oh. No,” Alan sees his expression and waves his hands reassuringly. “This is Sarah. My wife. She played the game too.”

“Oh,” Alex says, and thinks about Spencer, Fridge, Martha and Bethany again, with a pang of longing. _How’s that,_ he wonders. _Having that in common._ He wants to know everything.

“Where did you find it?” Alan asks, as they sit down in the living-room. There are no segues, no small talk. It’s right to the point.

“My father found it on the beach while he was out running. He brought it home for me.”

Sarah pinches her lips. “Stupid. We were stupid. Should have known.” She gives Alex a look that conveys an apology. “We tossed it in the river. We thought it would drown or something. But that game is a gift that just keeps on giving. I’m sorry, honey.”

“How long were you in there?” Alan asks.

“I don’t know. Months?”

“Hm,” Alan says, and sounds nearly disappointed.

Alex narrows his eyes at him. “How long have _you_ been there?” he asks defensively.

There’s a heavy pause before Alan tells him. “Twenty-six years.” And for a moment Alex cannot breathe.

“…How?” he asks eventually, choked up.

Alan shrugs, as Sarah stands behind him, squeezing his shoulder. He lifts his hand and squeezes her fingers back. “That’s what this game does,” he says.

And so they share stories. Detail after detail, like comparing notes. Alan tells him about being twelve, and finding the game, and being sucked into the jungle. About getting back, a _man_, and finishing it, and being twelve again. Talk about whiplash.

Alex tells him about the game changing for him, and the video-gaming rules. Alan finds it all darkly amusing. Grows tense at the mention of Van Pelt and nods morosely. Sarah listens. She has seen something different; something she shares with her husband, not Alex: a board game spilled out and tearing through real life, through this real town. But Alex has seen something her husband could never convey to her, as much as he probably tried: what it was like to be inside; the sights there; the life there.

They talk, in no point of order, of this:

  * “We all had a list of weaknesses. It was all very farcical. Mine was supposed to be mosquitos.”  
  
Sarah and Alan look at each other. “Oh yeah. I remember those. The size of your head,” Alan says. Sarah shudders.  
  
Alex blinks. “Um. No. Actually. They were normal sized.”  
  
Alan chuckles. “Lucky you, then.”  
  
“One of them killed me,” Alex bristles, and remembers air leaving his lungs, and not being able to move a limb, and air being pushed back.  
  
“Sorry,” Alan offers. “You seem fine now. And believe me, you should be grateful you weren’t facing off a mosquito with eyes the size of your fists. You just. You _really_ don’t.”
  * “You missed the loo, I bet.”  
  
Alan groans and buries his face in his hands.  
  
“God. _Yes_,” he moans.  
  
Alan laughs.
  * “Are you happy at home?” Alan asks.  
  
“Well. Yeah…” Alex frowns. Now more than ever. He has really missed his family. “Why? Weren’t you?”  
  
“I was… not unhappy. I was ungrateful. I always wondered if that’s why the game got me. Not everybody hears it, you see.”  
  
Alex blinks. “No, I didn’t think so,” he has to admit after thinking about it for a second.  
  
“I always thought it pegged me for a spineless coward.”  
  
“Alan,” his wife says admonishingly, and her hand rests on his back lovingly. He smiles at her.  
  
“I’m not anymore, but at twelve years old? I sure was. _A game for those who seek to find a way to leave their world behind_. That was me.”  
  
Alex shrugs. “I don’t—It got my dad first, didn’t it? He picked it up from the sand and brought it home. It must have sensed an opportunity, or something. But with me? I think it was just that I loved video games. Couldn’t resist the immersion. A different kind of escaping; a different kind of weakness.”
  * The twenty-six years that exist only in Alan and Sarah’s mind have changed a lot for Brantford. The economy collapsed, and the town collapsed. A tiny suburban apocalypse that nobody knows about.  
  
Alex wonders if anything at all will change because he lived and not died. He doubts it very much. His family are not the Parrishes, not the kind of people by whose reach towns make or break. He’s not any kind of a big deal.
  * “It’s… hard,” Sarah tries to explain it to him. “I was thirteen then. It’s the second time I’ve seen year 1995. Got to be forty twice. And I have two sets of memories. The first time around was not fun. Everyone thought I was crazy. I went to a bad shrink; to a bad college; got bad grades; shitty boyfriends.”  
  
Alan squeezes her hand a little bit. It must be so weird for them. In this life, they are childhood sweethearts. They are the only people to have touched each other. That’s what everyone around them knows. But in another life, she gave it up to somebody else, and they are the only ones who know that.  
  
“I remember it all only vaguely, now. In my soul, I think I’m forever young. We both are. That’s why we fit together. But in our memories? We are seventy years old.”
  * “That must be really lucky,” Alex says, among other things. “That you have each other to talk to.”  
  
Alan and Sarah look at each other with amusement. “We’ve had our differences,” he says wryly. “Twenty years of being alone because of our own stupidity, and because of each other. _In the jungle you must wait, till the dice read five or eight._ If only she would roll, I thought, as I waited on the inside, if only she kept playing. I would have been out sooner. I was angry at her; and I lived in the fucking jungle, kid, I came back barbaric; she lived a normal life, here. Or, semi-normal, pardon me,” he smiles at Sarah after her pointed cough. “Point is, it wasn’t all cherry blossoms and sunshine, the fact that we _knew_. But at the end of the day, there’s no one else who does.”
  * “If you’re afraid of something, you’ve got to stand and face it,” Alan tells him. It rings all too familiar. “My father taught me that. The game taught me that, too.”  
  
“Good advice,” Alex says quietly. “I think, the game taught me that as well. I don’t—I don’t _ever_ want to waste time. Not when—” he shakes his head; leaves the sentence hanging. It doesn’t need elaboration; they get it.  
  
“We didn’t either,” Sarah says quietly. “A good policy to live by. Most people take decades to realize you don’t need to worry about what society thinks of you. Just do what makes you happy, go after what you want. It’s good to realize it when you’re a teenager.”
  * And then.  
  
“There was… a girl there.”  
  
(It’s slightly more complicated than that, and Alex isn’t really prepared to have a freak-out about being attracted to maybe a girl he imagines was on the inside of Dr. Sheldon, or maybe being attracted to Dr. Sheldon. He shelves that for another time.)  
  
“There were people there,” Alan nods. “Like Van Pelt.” He shrugs. “They weren’t real.”  
  
“No, she was,” Alex says. “While I was trapped there, other people found the game. Many years later. It felt like only a couple of months passed for me, but they said it’s been years on the outside. They found the game, and played it from where I left off. We finished it together.”  
  
Alan and Sarah look at each other. “They aren’t real either,” Alan says again, full of careful sympathy this time.  
  
“No, they weren’t part of the game,” Alex tries to explain in exasperation.  
  
“No, we understand what you’re saying,” Alan stops him. Stands up and goes to his desk. Pulls out a photo album and carries it back. Flips to a recent Christmas party, and shows him a picture of two kids.  
  
“These are Peter and Judy. They were the ones who found the game after I was gone for twenty-six years. Played the game that me and Sarah started, got me out, and we finished it together too. I told you. After we won, all the changes reverted back. Including them. It was 1969 again. I was twelve, and Sarah was thirteen, and nothing ever happened. She had twenty-six years worth of memories of being crazy, and I had twenty-six years worth of being in Jumanji, and we remembered the game. But that memory was all we got. These kids,” he points at the picture with an expression of awful heartbreak. “They hadn’t been born yet. And when they had, and we met them, just this past year? They don’t remember us. Why would they? It never happened to them. None of it did. Their parents were still alive, they never moved to my house, which was never abandoned, they never found the game, they never had to play it, because me and Sarah tossed it into the river. And even if we hadn’t, there was no reason for them to save me. I was here. It’s a blasted time loop.”  
  
He seems angry, surprisingly. It’s the first time he ever got angry about anything tonight, and Sarah shushes him gently. They both look heartbroken. They both look the way Alex feels when he thinks about the others.  
  
“We prevented their parents from going on that blasted trip that killed them in our memories,” Alan says eventually, his voice bleak. “They’re happy now. We’re friends with their parents, we’re quite close, it’s the best, isn’t it? That we have managed to prevent the tragedy.” He shrugs, and his smile looks a little crooked. “But there’s a little …gap,” he says, knocking at his chest with his knuckles. Shrugs again.  
  
There are no words for it in him, but Alex doesn’t need words. He knows exactly what he’s saying. “_The missing piece_,” he whispers. Alan looks at him and exhales and nods.  
  
“I’m saying,” he says gently. “Whoever you met in that game? You said time passed. And they remembered you as the boy who disappeared. But now you haven’t. You’re here. And the game will never happen to them.”

Except then it did.

——o——

So that’s how it happens. He doesn’t see a shrink. He just phones and e-mails the Parrishes when he has new memories, new questions. Calls sometimes when the nightmares get bad, and it’s not weird. A shrink wouldn’t get it anyway; they do.

The game’s fate, according to Alan, is inconsequential. Still, Alex can’t bring himself to destroy it. He gives the console away, instead, to be distributed to schools, or poverty regions. Doesn’t want to know what happens with it after he’s done, honestly.

Whatever happened with Spencer and Bethany and the others, it happened to them in twenty years time. That’s what they said. He has no idea how, and how old they really were, or if that even happened in New Hampshire. And he doesn’t want to believe in what Alan says, about false memories, or lack thereof, but he also does believe it anyway.

(He dreams, once, of a gangly awkward teen, a tall athlete, a sullen redhead, and an uppity blonde. It doesn’t mean anything.)

What he does is goes to college. Majors in communications: seems the most versatile field of all, opening many doors to many futures. (It’s almost too many, and it’s almost like he’s trying to drown himself in the overwhelmingness of what’s to come so that he doesn’t think about what has happened.)

Motorola releases “clamshell” phones. They’re Star Trek inspired, which is kind of cool. Alex doesn’t really get them, but follows the evolution of the phones with keen interest. Still trying to guess what the hell that word means in 2016. By 1999, he’s beginning to catch on, as Nokia storms the market with sleek pocket cell phones, revolutionizing the face of communication. Brantford is slow to embrace these changes, but the Vreekes are the first to buy the new product. _They’re not here to stay, _critics bemoan, but Alex knows better. Not that he’s in any way prepared for smartphones.

In his only off-the-beaten path hobby, and a betrayal to his own resolution to move on, he learns to pilot aircrafts. It’s an excessive, upper-class, completely useless skill: it’s not like he’ll ever even own one. But he wants to do it and not feel like he’s being dragged, rope-tied, after a galloping horse, everything happening without his direct input, on some weird video game autopilot. He wants to do it with his own eyes, and with his own hands on the steering wheel.

Above all else, he tries to live his life alongside of other people. It’s college, where experiments go to stay buried, and secrets go to die. In his third year, at a party, he finally confronts the unanswered question from his time in the game and lets another guy (reasonably pleasant to look at) to get his hand into his pants. It’s not bad, but isn’t spectacularly life-changing either; it’s not like he was in any hurry to do anything other than a quick dick-tug. His memories about Jumanji are fading, but also not, and are a confusing mess of teenage hormones, and a fragile thing he keeps close to heart, enclosed and preserved in its original form, like in amber. He doesn’t name the thing, doesn’t torture himself with it. It’s just always there, will always be there. It’s been twenty-something years, and Alan and Sarah have found but still miss Judy and Peter. He has resigned himself to the thought of always missing Spencer, and Fridge, and Martha, and—Bethany.

He meets Virginia some years after college. She’s smart and driven and a good friend in a storm, and—well. He’s not getting any younger, and there are things you ought to do with your life. Things he wants to do. Have a family; take them hiking; revel in nature again and fucking take that, mosquitos. With every step he gets on with his life. It is a good life. He might never meet any of them again, and that’s fine, but he will honor what they did for him.

_The greatest lesson this game taught me,_ Alan said to him once, in his perpetually avuncular manner, _is not to be a sniveling coward; not to waste opportunities; to go after what one wants_. It’s good advice, and Alex has absorbed the same attitude from his experiences. He doesn’t play at social niceties; isn’t embarrassed to have opinions; doesn’t force himself to socialize with people he doesn’t like. “So mature for his age,” his college professors coo. Maybe. That tends to happen after surviving for three months in the jungle and having two deaths and one near-death experience.

He makes the most of it, is the thing, and tries not to feel like anything’s missing.

Then he meets them again, after twenty years of choices. And wants a do-over. And regrets everything.

——o——

Spencer  
  
still panicking over college  
  


He has panicked over getting into one, before. They all have, probably, each in their own way. It’s all sorted, but Spencer never stops worrying about everything—which was easy to forget when he looked like a wrestler, but they are quickly reminded of it in his manic bursts of texting.

Spencer  
  
it’s probably stupid, in the grand scheme of things, we’ve fared through worse, what’s a little cross-country moving  
  
Bethany:you’re all gonna be fine <3  
  
Spencer:my nervous system grew its own nervous system to give me more anxiety

——o——

Martha  
  
first day at campus, a guy approaches me out of nowhere to extol the virtues of “communism”. have these people obsessed with Marxism actually read *anything* about communism?

Fridge  
  
first day at campus, can we NOT use words like marxism in this group chat?

——o——

Fridge  
  
one of our professors gave out assignments today that were printed in papyrus  
  
i shit you fucking not  
  
Papyrus ©

——o——

Alex  
  
I know it’s been a hot second since I’ve attended, but here are a couple of tips:  
1\. Sit in front — the professors tend to remember their first couple of rows.  
2\. Make vision boards. The brain can access visual memory even when it’s over-tired.  
3\. Binder clips work great to help stack beer in the fridge.

——o——

That’s how it goes on for a while. An amiable text chain, and when they’re texting, when it’s all five of them, Alex’s age is erased, he’s just Alex, he’s just one of them.

It honestly doesn’t occur to Bethany to have conversations with them that doesn’t involve the whole group—at least until Spencer slips up and sends sort of a sext to the entire chatroom.

Spencer  
  
r we still on for 2nite? bought that magic wand you liked

Bethany  
  
please don’t be a euphemism

Fridge  
  
..................................gross

Fridge will probably not let Spencer live it down until they’re well into their eighties.

Martha stops answering messages in the chatroom for two weeks, pretending to be AFK while dealing with being horribly mortified.

Alex tries to play it off, while being gentlemanly about it.

Either way, it’s that unfortunate incident that makes Bethany realize that you can have separate chats aside from their group chat room. Spencer clearly has one with Martha, and, come to think of it, he probably has one with Fridge as well, because they’ve been friends for far longer. So she reaches out to Martha first, who’s instantly grateful to talk tete-a-tete with another girl, and asks Bethany for boy advice about Spencer. Then she starts casually chatting with Fridge about gym stuff, and about his studies: out of the four of them, he’s the most career-readiness-oriented, just like her, while Martha’s pursuing her Creative Writing studies, and Spencer is chasing the dream of designing a super app that will blow up.

She wonders, of course, if anyone chats with Alex. Spencer might be, she suspects, just because he’s Spencer. She debates writing to him for a while, a draft sitting in her app for weeks, unsent. In the end, he beats her to it.

Alex  
  
How is South America treating you?

It’s as easy as that. She answers by sending out pictures, and tells him about her day. And then tells him about her week, and then tells him about her day every day—clinging to that fantasy of an easy friendship that she hoped for. Just setting herself up for more heartbreak, but the worst thing is: he’s good at it, at lending a friendly ear. Small talk comes to them as easy as breathing. He asks small questions: favorite drink, what songs she has completely memorized, what fictional place she would want to visit. She tells him about a kiwi/pineapple smoothie she used to make on her previous diet, and about a passionate love affair she has with Marina and the Diamonds, and that she’d want to go to the Bathhouse from _Spirited Away_. He tells her about his hard rock obsession, and about his job, and sometimes about his children. Never mentions his wife—she gathers from off-hand comments that the relationship between them is over—still, she’s grateful for his discretion.

And then she writes to him when she can’t sleep. _That_ she can’t sleep. That she has nightmares. Writes, and waits, heart hammering in the night. His answer comes with no delays, readily, despite the hour. He writes that he used to have them for years, afterwards. It isn’t a reassuring sentiment, but it isn’t meant to be.

The next time it happens, the next time she wakes up from the memories of a swallowing jungle to the smells and sounds of a different one, and can’t separate the two for a second, before she feels her own body, slim and feminine, and palms for her phone lying next to her in the tent—is the first time she facetimes him.

“Bethany?” he looks thoroughly confused to be getting her call.

“Sorry, nevermind, go back to sleep,” she says immediately, eyes travelling to the time. It’s 5:13 AM.

“It’s 8AM here, I’m awake,” he answers quickly. “What’s wrong?”

“I had a nightmare,” she whispers. “About—you know.” She can’t bring herself to say the word, like some speak-of-the-devil self-summoning curse. “I usually call Martha when that happens.”

“Oh?” His confusion only grows, and she smiles, endeared despite herself.

“She’s the easiest to talk to out of them,” she confesses.

“So why call me?”

“It seemed right in the moment. I was barely awake, I wasn’t thinking.”

He smiles wistfully at her. “Well. You’ve got me. You wanna tell me about it?”

She shakes her head. “Not really.”

“I used to call somebody, too,” he offers tentatively. “I used to dream about burning up in the airplane I tried to escape on. Or I just dreamt that I was still stuck there. Dreamt about it a lot.”

“Do you still?” she asks quietly.

“No,” he shakes his head. “It’s been enough time.” (Twenty years, it has been twenty years, she reminds herself angrily.)

“Thank you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I called.”

“Don’t be,” he offers quickly. “I’m always here.”

She nods uncertainly, and hangs up, and throws her head back hard into the pillow and groans.

——o——

Her Instagram account becomes a testament to her walkabout. She’s not exactly a cartographer, but it’s close enough.

She starts with an eighty-days voyage with _Sea-_mester. Learns seamanship, and navigation, and gets certified as a scuba diver. Surfs and snorkels in the azure waters of the Carribean; and her camera work is never not busy. Nothing of what she’s doing is anything she’s ever envisioned for her life, yet there she is, doing all of these amazing improbable things.

She learns that she really, really loves the ocean. They’re spending two days at sea at most, with frequent port stops, so that the people won’t grow tired of sea life. Sometimes, she wishes she could take the boat and sail off into the endless horizon for a week, for two weeks. She doesn’t do it, of course. She isn’t insane.

Afterwards, it’s off to backpacking in Brazil, and down across Patagonia, and back up north through Peru. She starts picking up Spanish. Works on an alpaca farm for two weeks. Learns traditional crafts from the locals, like making hand-made jewelry. Takes an EMT course. (This is all earning her academic credit in something like Peoples & Cultures or Experiential Learning—she has already picked a university, but deferred admission.) She’s not a cartographer, but she’s good at the modern equivalent of it, it turns out: travel coordination, logistics, research, budget, safety plans, local liasoning.

“You don’t have to be a Hollywood star or a billionaire playboy to make a difference in people’s lives,” an instructor tells them conspiratorially. There are a few polite laughs at his attempt to speak their lingo. “Change begins with you making a direct impact on another person’s life through a personal act of kindness.”

Bethany hides her eyes and doesn’t think about Alex lying in the grass, his life growing back as her own fades.

——o——

There is no version of this where he possibly waits for her.

You don’t stay in love for twenty years with a girl you’ve never even seen, even if she saves your life. But you can learn her anew, and she can remind you of that boy you’ve never grown out of, the boy that was trapped inside a game that is still there inside of you.

His marriage has slowly disintegrated, as Virginia went on to conquer new career heights and he remained a stay-at-home dad. He doesn’t mind. They remain friends, and it’s a little hard to let go off a certain way of living, a certain way his life was meant to go. It’s even harder not to think now that they were never meant for each other to begin with. Not that he imagines him and Bethany were. He shouldn’t go there.

It’s that weird thing, when you know someone at a certain age, and then you stop knowing them, and then you forever remember them as your own age, the age you are now. Like kids from his elementary school, or kids from his high school, he doesn’t remember them as children, he remembers equals. And he thinks of Bethany like that, too. He was fifteen, and she seemed something like the same age, and his memory of her has aged with him. It’s just a human brain’s way of looking at things, and it’s entirely unfair to the person she is right now, he knows that. And she’s young, she has her whole life ahead of her, and he won’t let her make the mistakes he has made, and anyway he doesn’t _think_ anything about her. (It’s a lie. He does. He just makes himself not to.) Because, honestly, what? What the hell does she need with a man with two children who remembers being smitten with her many years ago? It was endearing then. It’s downright pathetic now.

——o——

The empty place in Bethany’s confidence that Lucinda used to occupy is replaced by Felicidad ‘Fliss’ Álvarez, whom people take for a local guide, because preconceptions, but she’s as local as their sneakers.

Fliss, it turns out, has deferred to the same college that Bethany has. She wants to study wildlife biology, and is here to observe animal behaviors in the wild for the first time. She says she understands them better than she does people.

Moreover, Fliss knows loss, her brother has recently passed, and she recognizes the sameness of the two of themm in Bethany. “You have gone through something traumatic,” she says one evening at the campfire, as the day is settling down around them, and people break off to do their own thing.

“You could say that,” Bethany says. “I can’t talk about it.”

“That’s alright,” Fliss shrugs. “I don’t talk about mine either.”

But that serves as more glue in their quickly building friendship.

She meets people, is the point, and she also meets boys. Boys her age. Some of them brash, some flirtatious. Others kind, composed. Honest young men, enjoying the human rights work. Funny extraverted boys that take her to local festivals, and quiet introverted types who like the research. There’s one young man in particular, in his late twenties, a climbing instructor. He pays attention to her, many of them do, she’s Bethany fucking Walker, she knows how to sway her hips, and flip her hair, and bite down on her lip. She knows how to flirt back.

It’s completely hollow, every time, and she wants to scream at the sky, and at her phone, and at Alex, but instead she goes back to her room and texts him, and they spend two hours talking about that new book she asked him to read, or that movie they have both seen but never could discuss, there’s twenty years of catching up for both of them.

——o——

On summer break, Alex invites them over. He has a country house, and he lives alone now, no wife, so no need to explain away their strange intergenerational friendship. They can just be who they are.

Bethany doesn’t plan to arrive first. In fact, she plans it painstakingly so that she doesn’t, but Fridge’s flight is delayed, much to his fury, and Bethany’s quiet mortification. She hesitates on Alex’s porch for a hot second before ringing the bell.

“Hey,” he greets her softly, opening the door. “Come on in.”

“Hey,” she says back, and pretends this isn’t super awkward.

“Make yourself at home,” he says, and at least he looks as awkward as she feels. She forces out a tight smile.

He has a nice house. Clean and would-be-austere if not for the clear presence of children. He has custody, she knows: his company is where he’s at, he works freely from home, but his wife is a CFO somewhere important, and going places, so the kids stay with him. He’s happy with the arrangement.

“Where are your children?” Bethany asks, picking up a photo of the two of them.

“They’re with a sitter,” he says. “She will bring them back tomorrow. Andy is only two, and Dinah’s four. They still need watching, and we wouldn’t be able to do all the things that I have planned.”

“_Dinah_?” Bethany raises an eyebrow.

Alex offers her a lopsided smile. “It’s her middle name. I gently suggested to my wife we should start calling her that. She didn’t really need much persuading, seeing as I picked the first name, and she picked the middle one.”

The reason for that hangs uncomfortable between them, but she appreciates the thought.

“I guess you can always start calling me Shelley,” she quips, her tone dry.

He makes a face at her, apologetic, and pleading, that says _please don’t torture me here_. She hides an uneasy smile.

The rest of the gang arrives several hours later, turning the air companionable instead of awkward. And Alex still makes killer margaritas. And they are still kids, college kids now, and he’s almost like a kid with them. She wonders which one it is to him: if he feels young with them, chases that illusion, or if he sees the kids, and feels avuncular. Neither of those possibilities is good for her heart and what it wants.

——o——

In 2018, Alan Parrish is now sixty years old. Or eighty-six, depending on how you look at it.

“You’re telling us now?” Spencer asks loudly. “Seems like something you could have mentioned, like, I don’t know, immediately?”

“I didn’t know how,” Alex says simply, in that genuine way he always says anything.

Spencer sputters a little bit. “You didn’t know _how_? We were _there_ with you, who _else_ would completely and totally _get_ it.”

Alex looks serene in the wake of them all being rightfully pissed about it. “Well, we’re not exactly a support group talking about a freak adventure. We don’t ever talk about our freak adventure, in fact. I’m not bringing you there for some novelty experience, I’m bringing you there because he’s my friend. Because we have this now, and you’ve always had each other. I didn’t have anyone.”

That makes them simmer down, somewhat embarrassed.

“No, it’s okay,” he gives them his easy smile. “But listen. He’s played a very different game from you and me. Which is again why I didn’t—” he stops that thought and rearranges it. “It’s not like there was any rush, is all I’m saying. He has helped me a lot, back in the day. Gave me some good advice. But it was a different game, so he gave me a bit of a bad one.”

Bethany wonders what he means by that for the rest of their trip over.

Alan and Sarah Parrish are delighted to meet them. Seem well-adjusted—not that any of them had any doubts, since Alex is well-adjusted also. The sight of them was probably very comforting for him, though.

His wife played the game as well, he says, with a loving smile, and Bethany’s heart skips a little step, and she glances at Alex. He seems not to notice, but then again, he has known this for twenty years, it probably doesn’t echo in him in the way it echoes in her.

They have two kids. Twins, a boy and a girl. Their son, Jason, is introduced to them, and then quickly ushered out: there is no way he can be part of this conversation.

“Good kid,” Alan says. “Fourth year of college now, so smart. But. You know. We can’t ever explain this to them, can we?” He smiles at them, a little crookedly. He has a child’s smile, despite his age.

“Told him and his sister stories, though, when they were kids,” Sarah says wryly. “Our life was certainly stranger than fiction.”

“Where _is_ Sam, by the way?” Alex asks.

“Oh, she’s _out_,” Alan says, in that parental tone of _she’s-on-a-date_ out, when you’re not exactly sure how to deal with it when it’s your daughter. “With Peter Shepherd.”

Alex looks mildly amused. “Oh, is that what’s happening now?”

“Apparently so. Guess it was inevitable with us.” He looks a little wistful, and Alex looks sympathetic, and the rest of them feel out of the loop.

And then they don’t. Alan tells them what happened to him. And Sarah tells them what happened to her. The twenty-six missing years they have, and no one else does, and their own clash with Van Pelt, and the game spilling out into Brantford, and Judy and Peter.

And she gets it then. In the spaces between the story, and Alan’s experience, the bitter-sweet loss of their coming back, which he has undoubtedly shared with Alex, and the carefully folded expression he’s wearing now. She _gets_ it. He wasn’t expecting them back, not really. And if he was, whenever _that_ might have happened. He wasn’t expecting them to ever remember him.

“I think it was that we were inside,” she says softly. Realizes she’s been staring when he looks at her, and quickly averts her eyes, looks at Alan instead. “You said, everything on the outside reverted. Everything that happened with the town, and the rest of the world. But we were _inside_ the game. It spat us where it stole us from; _when_ it stole us from. And the world changed, but we were on the inside, and—” she loses that train of thought. None of this is logical, none of this is common laws of physics, or space, or time. “I don’t know,” she folds. “That’s what I got.”

When she glances to the right of her, Alex is still looking at her, and she doesn’t meet his eyes.

——o——

They speak for a long time, at an unhurried pace. Alan and Sarah know of their story, but only the sum of its parts. So Fridge boasts defanging a snake; and he and Spencer get into an argument over killing each other that one time; and Spencer makes fun of Bethany for being stuck the way she was stuck; and Spencer gushes a little bit too much, about everything. Alex listens to it all, a little bit enraptured. He doesn’t actually know any of this either. It’s like he said: they do not talk about their freak adventure, not really. Inside the game, they’ve told him the basics, but not a lot of what had already happened to them. Outside, they haven’t told him anything at all.

The conversation moves on, eventually. They relocate from the fireplace parlor to the dining room—because these are the Parrishes, and this is kind of a mansion, so of course they have thirty rooms for various purposes. And outside of the parlor, there’s the real world, and Alan and Sarah’s son and the conversation is firmly steered into perfectly normal topics.

“May I give you the tour of the castle?” Jason offers her. Fourth year of college, they mentioned, so he’s in his early twenties. Something like three or four years her senior, and a perfect gentleman: the kind they raise in proper and decent old-money households like this, with good old-fashioned parents. He seems older than he is: probably because his parents are, and so much more older than their age. They’ve raised him to be ready: for everything, the real world, and the unreal world, too, not that he realizes it.

“My dad really wanted me to have some wilderness survival skills,” he says with a smile, pointing to a wall of trophy weapons. “At fifteen? I hated it. Not much of a camper, here. I think it’s his old-school mentality, you know. Boarding school for boys, and all that. The way his father taught him to be a man.”

Bethany smiles politely at him, and thinks that inside one evening she already understands his father better than he ever could. It’s a little sad.

“But yeah. I know how to shoot a rifle, even though I hate guns. And I know how to survive a zombie apocalypse, I guess.” He smiles at her again, and she means, he _smiles_ at her. She knows the unspoken question behind that smile.

She smiles back, because it’s a probing smile, but it’s an unthreatening smile, too, and she is at his house, and he can still play it off as being a gracious host, it’s nothing too forward. Not his fault that she notices.

But then there’s movement behind his back. Not loud, so he doesn’t turn, just a figure emerging, and Bethany looks behind his back, and Alex is standing there. Has been standing there a while, he’s not the sitting down type, he’s probably been resting against the doorframe, still participating in the conversation happening on the inside. And he noticed them. And the expression on his face, jaw taut, eyes harder than she has ever known him to have, makes her blush. Because she knows what he’s looking at here. Her. Smiling at a young man that he _knows_, probably _approves_ of, actually, and he’s a nice young man, an appropriately _aged_ young man, and there’s no reason for him to look anything but amused, and relaxed, and one of his old friends is getting charming with the other. But that’s not how he looks.

She opens her mouth and repeats on auto-pilot, “Zombie apocalypse, huh?” before the pause stretches out uncomfortably.

“Sorry,” Jason laughs, winsomely bashful. “Nerd alert.”

Bethany smiles in spite of herself, because he’s sweet, but her eyes shift to Alex again, and she catches his eyes this time, and she knows he’s staring, and he knows she knows, but he keeps doing it anyway. And she has no power in her left for any games; but his eyes, intent, and dark, and determined, are genuine.

And Jason is very nice. Maybe even perfect—for somebody, not for her. “You know,” she says, taking him by the elbow, and walking back towards the rest of them. “You should really get to know my friend Martha. I think you might have more in common with her.”

She isn’t lying, either. Martha does like her nerds.

——o——

“There’s an airfield nearby,” Alex tells them, when they make it back to his house. “I have a license. I can take you there if you want.”

“Wait,” Martha says. “You have a piloting license? Like—” she lets the sentence drop and compresses her lips uncomfortably.

“Like ‘Seaplane,’” Alex finishes for her calmly. “Yes. It was part of my therapeutic purging of personal demons,” he says with a rueful smile.

In the silence that follows Martha blurts out, “I take dancing lessons now.” The others look at her, and she waves her hand in the air. “Because Ruby was graceful and badass and knew all these moves, and I—miss her. I mean, look at me.”

She points at herself from head to toes, and Spencer reaches for her hand with a soft, “Hey,” and a shake of his head. She shrugs. It isn’t shame. She’s just no Ruby Roundhouse.

“I’m also thinking about taking up t’ai chi,” she informs them, looking at the points of her shoes.

“I joined a gym,” Spencer says, on the heels of her confession. “I’m a nerd, but so was Indiana Jones, and, well, you can be both,” he finishes, thrusting his chin up. Bethany smiles at his half-insecurity half-bravado.

“Yeah, I’ve taken up weight lifting,” Fridge says. Everyone looks at him, ‘cause that’s not exactly the same, and he narrows his eyes. “That game made me feel small, and I’ll never be small again.” There’s a pause, and he admits, looking away. “I also joined a baking school. No motherfucking cake owns me, okay? I’ll own the cake.”

They break into laughter, and it’s suddenly so easy, all of them united by their own personal fuck-yous to Jumanji.

“Let’s see that airfield,” Bethany says, and Alex smirks.

“‘Seaplane’ McDonough, reporting for duty, ma’am,” he says, popping on his Ray-Bans. Her heart stammers.

——o——

It’s the hardest night of her life to be lying in bed, in his house, thinking of him. She thought she has closed herself to that possibility, but finds herself as open as ever.

She falls asleep for a while, but her dreams are surface and restless, and she wakes up several times, the numbers on the clock ticking by ever so slowly. It’s close to dawn when she finally gives up and slips back into her clothes, grabs her phone, plugs in her ear buds, and goes outside to watch the day break and think.

She was supposed to be selfless. There’s having a crush on a cute boy, and then there’s human fucking worry, and she gave up a life so that he’d get to have one. And he did. He had twenty years worth of a life, and she hates herself for being selfish and petty, but she resents it now, and feels awful, and ungrateful, because there’s human worry, and then there’s you, and a boy, and you wanted him for yourself.

She’s happy for him, of course she is, but she wanted to be happy _with_ him, be a part of his happy, and she deserved to get more out of this wretched scenario. Beating a game is supposed to be about winning, and she doesn’t feel like a winner, she feels cheated, because she deserved to get what she wanted—everyone else did—and she wanted Alex.

She was never shy, she always knew how to take, and how to get her way. Not at the expense of others, but she always marched towards what made her happy. She was always willing to work for it, too, it wasn’t all falling at her feet. But it made her greedy for happiness.

But this. She doesn’t know what to do with this. How to approach it. It isn’t simple, isn’t trite, and at this point she realizes it is not containable.

She feels like an oyster: inside of her is a perfect memory, untarnished, of how he made her feel. She just wishes (cruelly) that they wouldn’t have found each other on the outside at all, and it would just stay that. A memory. But he’s here. And it’s good that he’s here, he’s their missing piece, it’s where he belongs, but he makes her feel that way still. And it’s not a pearl anymore, it’s the irritable grain of sand grating at her insides, and she feels so tired of feeling that way.

And she’s angry. At herself, for being this stupid, a pathetic infatuated schoolgirl. And at him, and his clueless kind eyes, the way he looks at her, and it’s the same look he had after she saved him, and he is doing this to her, leading her on, by simply existing. He might have missed her; all of them; but it was yesterday for her, and twenty years of yesterdays for him.

The door to the terrace opens, and she isn’t the only one who couldn’t fall asleep, it turns out. Alex steps out onto the porch, and of course, of course it would be him.

“Bethany?” he asks uncertainly.

“Sorry,” she startles out of the chair, and huddles tighter into the blanket. “I couldn’t sleep.”

He’s wearing a flight jacket, she realizes, upon looking closer. He rubs his neck awkwardly. “No, me neither,” he admits. “I was gonna head for the airfield again. Unwind.” He stares at her, and the implicit invitation hangs in the air. She looks expectantly at him. “Would you—” he starts and doesn’t finish.

“Yes, please,” she answers anyway, because that’s good enough for her. He doesn’t smile, too tense for that, and nods. She folds the blanket carefully onto the chair and straightens up. “Lead on,” she says.

Alex flies the way she sails—with a want for an endless expanse of space and nothingness, where reality dissipates, and he’s the only creature left in the universe, and he’s free. Except this time, she is here with him.

The dawn comes with a hazy pink light, stroking the earth, and the clouds, and their plane. It makes her feel particularly light.

“I’ll bring us back in,” Alex says. “It’s about to become colder. The temperature always drops with the dawn.” The plane makes a soft curve and begins its slow circular descent, and Bethany reaches out and takes Alex’s hand. He startles, and looks at her hand over his, and looks at her, and maybe it’s the dawn that made her so unapologetically brave. She smiles, like it was nothing, and takes her hand back, but she knows what she saw, back at the Parrishes, he was jealous, and she will never let go off that, even as she lets go off him.

——o——

They all have bus tickets for the next day. To take them back to Brantford. These ones were bought in bulk, so she might not have arrived with them, but she is leaving with them.

The others are cheerful; refreshed and rested, and a new knowledge lighting the air up between them. She… isn’t. She’s putting on a brave face. Acting like she’s the happiest person in the world has always been one of her talents, and she hates pretending with them, but it’s better than bumming them out, she figures.

Alex drives them to the bus station and stands there, waving at them. There are other families there, some of them seeing off their teenage kids, and they are both palpably aware of how they might look exactly the same. He stands stiffly by the car, but Spencer is Spencer, so he goes up and hugs him, like they’re peers; and Martha follows, because Martha always follows Spencer; Fridge offers Alex a complicated bro-fist-slap-something gesture that she never can figure how all men seem to know. She doesn’t move. Waves at him awkwardly before getting on the bus, and he raises his hand stiffly, and thrusts his chin up at her.

She catches one last glimpse of him through the window, hands stuck in pockets, and all clenched up. She rests her temple against the cool glass and watches the road and thinks of the Parrish house; and thinks of this morning; at the way he looked at her.

Fridge ends up changing seats and sitting by her side two stops later.

“You wanna know what I think?” he says conversationally.

“Hm?” she raises her head and looks at him.

“I think you should go back,” he says. She frowns at him, and he rolls his eyes. “Don’t give me that, Walker. I have eyes. You should go back to him. Talk to each other, finally.”

“What is there to talk about,” she says quietly. She doesn’t pretend that she doesn’t understand what he means.

“I’m sure I don’t wanna know, but it bears talking about anyway,” Fridge says. He really is the smartest of them all, even if he doesn’t show it. She places her hand atop his and squeezes. She isn’t about to go anywhere.

He shakes his head. “Haven’t you learnt anything?” he asks in exasperation. “This game, man. It was the worst fucking thing that could have happened to us, but it gave us a second chance at being ourselves. After surviving it, what else could be so scary? So fucking go. Be yourself. Stop chickening out over this.”

Bethany blinks at him, and he is right, but even if she was brave enough to go solo to Patagonia, she doesn’t think she’s brave enough for what he’s saying.

——o——

It’s getting dark, when Alex opens the door—they have already ridden a fair distance out, and she had to wait for a returning bus, which aren’t that frequent in this part of New Hampshire. His expression grows concerned.

“Bethany,” he says. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes,” she says, and it must be the way she says it, because his expression shifts from concerned to cornered.

It’s funny, really, because he holds the whole of her in the palm of his hand, and she has him in her blood, it feels like, and he’s still staring at her like she has the upper hand, somehow. Maybe she does. Maybe she always has.

“This has to end,” she says, a little too forcefully. He’s holding the door open for her, but she’s still standing in the doorway. It’s easier to backtrack from the porch if she ends up having to. “Aren’t you tired of it?”

“What?” he asks, quiet and lost.

She sways in place and then steps inside after all, and he backs away. She’s powering through by sheer anger, because even after the game, and after everything that has happened after the game, this is the scariest thing she has ever done.

“It’s draining. To want this,” she says simply. “Isn’t it for you?”

His expression is unknowable to her; she cannot read him. “Bethany…” he whispers, and she hears in his voice that it’s a beginning of a no. “You _don’t_ want this. What are you doing. We can’t. And what would people think.” None of these are complete sentences.

“You care what people think?” she stares at him. “Or is that what _you_ think?” Her voice doesn’t shake when she says it, but her heart does.

“Bethany,” he says again. “I don’t want to wreck your life. I can only ruin it. You have so many futures. I shouldn’t be it. I shouldn’t be even one of it.”

She thinks of his eyes on her again, that heavy stare, like he’s clenching around something painful lodged in his ribcage, a hook that is never going away, and he’s just trying to deal with it, learn to live with it, forever, and it makes her ache for how much he doesn’t have to. He looks at her now like he wants her to rip it out and set him free, but she can’t do that. She can only show him she’s hooked to.

“You know, if there’s one thing I know after getting out of that fucking game, is that I don’t care what anybody thinks. I only care what you think. What _I_ think. What I _want_. I _know_ what I want. That’s all that matters to me. And I don’t want to waste time beating around the bush. And I wouldn’t have pushed it if I thought—but—I saw you. You know that I saw.” She shrugs. That’s not a complete sentence either, but it’s too hard to keep talking about it out loud. To phrase the question, _do you want me?_ and have him lie, or, worse, tell the truth.

He doesn’t say anything back for a long time. He is twice her age, and not, and he doesn’t get it, that she knows he is still _that boy_. That a part of him hasn’t grown up, not really. That she has figured it out.

“I know that lesson,” he says finally, carefully. His eyes stay above her head. His voice sounds very dry. “From the game,” he elaborates. “I did it too, for years. Was bold; brave; living every day like it could be my last. I was the best version of myself.”

She realizes she’s holding her breath and lets it out. “But?” she asks, and her voice is so soft for a second she isn’t sure he could even hear that.

“There was a different lesson, too,” and he looks at her finally. She sees his throat move. “Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if you’re brave about it. Sometimes, things are beyond your control.” He takes one step towards her, less than a step, an _inch_. “Sometimes, you may want things, and you may go after them, and you will learn that they are out of reach.”

Her breath hitches in her chest, wind getting knocked out of her, with refusal, with _vehemence_. “No,” she whispers, and her voice is hoarse, breaking, she has to swallow around it, and then again, “No,” louder, clearer this time. “I’m here.” She steps into his space, and his hands land on her waist, and he nearly shivers, or maybe it’s her. Her fingers reach for his neck, his head, he’s so much taller, she scrapes at his skin through his hair, bringing him closer to her.

They do not kiss. She doesn’t make him. Instead, they press their faces to one another. Her nose against his stubble. His mouth against her temple. She still can’t tell which one of them is shuddering. Maybe they both are.

She does kiss him then. His jaw, the side of his face, she presses her lips to his skin, and it’s not a brush, it’s an unmistakable intent. She can feel his own lips parting, ever so slightly, and his head moves. And they are kissing then. His mouth is on hers, and his hand slides up her back and gets tangled up in her hair, a stronger grip than she was expecting, as he presses them closer, and she whimpers. With relief, but something other than, something bigger than, like a rock that has been pressed on top of her has finally been moved, and she can breathe, and laugh, and cry, and dance, and she can be kissing him, and whatever sound escapes her is want, a want that she doesn’t have to step on any longer.

The first kiss is interrupted with a second, then a third, they become shorter, as they need to breathe, and it’s not about kissing, they just want to touch each other, her hands are pressed to his face, and she’s mapping him out, a different sort of cartography.

He opens his eyes and looks at her, and his expression is still unknowable to her, she wants to know what he’s thinking; but his eyes are transparent and unequivocal.

He doesn’t ask anything along the lines of _Are you sure?_ For all his hang-ups he knows she won’t stand for being treated like that. Instead, he says, “The bedroom’s upstairs,” and takes a step towards it. He’s still holding her hand, but lightly. She can let go at any moment.

“Yes,” she says, and takes a step to follow him, and it’s a _yes_ said to all the unspoken things that are in the air between them.

Inside his room, he kisses her again, hard and eager this time. Like he expects her to disappear at the stroke of midnight. Like he expects her not to keep. Like he wants to make sure they get everything out of the way before his time runs out.

“Let me,” he murmurs, tugging at her buttons, and she lets him undress her, her shirt, her jeans, her bra, just as her fingers are dragging his own clothes off of him until they are very naked in front of one another. He doesn’t say anything she might have expected a man to say in this situation; then again, Alex isn’t much for words; his eyes, though, speak volumes.

In bed, they keep mapping each other out, hands and mouths. His hands travel up and down her back, her sides, and finally move past her ribs, her abdomen, lower and lower, and his finger dips between her legs, just an inch, and she gasps. She has touched herself before, many times, but for the first time in her life it’s someone else, no, not just someone, it’s Alex touching her. His eyes are watching her as she pants around the sensation.

When it is finally not his fingers, she cannot help the small stifled cry that escapes her, and slaps her hand over her mouth. Her insides feel on fire, and she bites down on her lower lip so hard she thinks she might have drawn blood—anything to offset the pain between her legs. Her stomach cramps as she tenses, and her eyes sting.

He freezes. He freezes before she even tenses, before she makes a sound: he knew this was coming. (It isn’t making her jealous, that he knows to do so, it isn’t making her ashamed, she isn’t thinking those things, not right now, she won’t.)

“It’s okay,” he promises, bending towards her, and his arms snake underneath her back, and he cradles her. And his cock is pulsing hot between her legs. She whimpers a little at the movement. “It’s okay,” he says, his voice impossibly kind, and, “Can I?”

She nods against his face pressed to hers: cannot unclench her bit lip, still. He slowly pulls back, and she shudders, and tenses against him moving forward again. His hand travels across her chest to her clit, rubbing around it, as he’s rocking in and out, and _god, yes,_ there it is, she gasps, making him stutter again, and she digs her fingers into his ribs and whispers, “Yes,” and as he thrusts again she moves to meet him, and he’s the one who moans this time.

“Come here,” he murmurs against her mouth, and he flips them, so that he’s lying on his back, and she’s straddling him, she can do whatever she wants to him. Their fingers are intertwined so tightly his hands become her hands, and he arches upwards into her. “Bethany,” he says, and again, “Bethany,” just her name, like that’s the only thing that matters, like it’s just her, and it’s the most poignant thing about this that it’s her. She rides that feeling, and rides him, flooded with it from head to toes until she curls and tenses with it, and more more more, he’s still pushing rocking against her—_ah_.

She sags against him, and he’s so tall she can just stretch over him, and his arms wrap gently around her. Her heart is hammering so loud she’s sure he can feel it where their chests connect. Carefully, she slides off of him to the side. He hums, and kisses her temple, and the crook of her neck, and sits up.

“Stay here,” he asks, like he still expects her to disappear if he turns away for just a second. She lifts her eyebrows, and he chuckles, recognizing his own foolishness, and goes into the bathroom. She watches his bare ass disappear behind the corner. Listens to the sound of running water.

He returns with a hand towel, sits on the bed again, and gently wipes her legs, and between her legs—the towel is wet and pleasantly warm—and then he leans in and presses a kiss to the inside of her thigh. He wipes her over again, more thoroughly, and presses a kiss to the jutting bone of her hip, and her abdomen, just above the hairline, and then above the bellybutton, and kisses her ribs, and her breasts (she gasps at how tender they feel), and the arch of her throat, and finally finds his way back to her mouth. She never wants him to stop kissing her, and nothing will ever be enough that they would stop wanting to be close to one another. She kisses him gently, patiently, because they are here, now, and limitless, and will not end. Even if he still watches her with a mixture of longing and cautious fear, like she will realize what a mistake she’s making.

She laughs slightly, not because any of it is ridiculous, although maybe it is: sex, after all, is not a serious matter. But she laughs because of the sheer joy of it, because of how deliriously happy he makes her.

He folds her into his arms, and she him into hers, until they become a single being, a single breath. His hands continue travelling up and down her back in half a caress, half a reassurance. That she is here, that he’s finally got her.

——o——

In the morning, his kids are unsurprised to find her in their home. Their dad has friends. Sometimes those friends may stay over. Nothing else enters their brains.

She makes them all a family breakfast; it’s all she can do, a small gesture of domesticity.

“I have to leave,” she says finally, carefully.

He freezes, with his mug presses to his lips, and there’s a pause before he finally takes a sip and says, “Mm-hmm,” into his coffee.

It makes her smile. “Don’t freak out,” she says. He shrugs and shakes his head in a gesture of _I wasn’t_. She smiles wider. “Yeah, you were.” She steps closer and puts one hand over his, the mug-free hand lying on the table. Strokes his fingers, and he twists his palm, captures her hand and squeezes. Like he’s holding on for real life. She rubs her thumb over his knuckles in circles.

“You know I had plans,” she says softly, not looking up, looking at their hands still. “There’s not exactly a pause button on them. I have to get ready. But,” and she looks up. “I would like to come back? Is that okay?”

He stares at her, neck tense, and she doesn’t think he can speak now, lets out another choked-up “Mm-hmm,” along with a jerky nod.

She raises her hand and touches his face again, fingers scraping through his hair. He leans into her touch, closing his eyes.

“I want to be here. All the time. I have plans, but I can make these plans from wherever you are.”

He hums. “And then you’ll leave.”

She nods, cautiously. “And then I’ll leave,” she agrees, and means college, and hopes that so does he. “That’s where I am right now. But we have months before that, and I want to learn your life, and for you to learn mine, and how we fit into each other’s spaces.” She cocks her head to the side and studies him. “Will you let me?”

He looks at her with a naked, startled expression. Like he cannot understand how she can ask that. Like she could ask him anything at this point, and every answer would be _yes_.

“You shouldn’t do this for me,” he says, his eyes very warm on hers.

She startles, and squeezes his hand harder, and frowns. “Haven’t you figured it out yet? I’m doing this for me. I—Please—Can you—Can _we_ do this? Can you just trust me?”

She wonders what it is that he’s afraid of. That she won’t want to return? That peer pressure will be too much, that she’ll change her mind? That she’ll go off to college, and whatever she’s feeling will pass? She can’t tell him anything that will convince him. But he has waited for her for twenty years, and she’s the same way, she has twenty years worth of love inside her chest, and more after that. They were always meant to be together, that’s their story. And she has plenty of time to prove it to him.

——o——

She tells her family she’s going to stay with a friend until the start of the semester. They don’t really question it, not after she has spent nearly a year in the Amazon jungles. There is no reason for them to be worried or suspicious; she’s all grown-up.

They have a month until she has to go to college. She falls into his life as easy as breathing. It’s his house; he has his routines, and she wraps around them like a vine. She cooks on the nights when he doesn’t; sometimes they cook together, which is far more intimate than she would have anticipated: the act of making something together. She goes flying with him whenever possible, and it is never not breathtaking. She stays with his kids, when he asks her too, and they love her, which is a relief: she never figured that she’d be any good with them, but it turns out that although both are at an age where they are easily upset, they’re also easily distractible from things that upset them, so iPad cartoons become her biggest friend. They have chess nights, and board games nights, and movie nights, and nights where he’s just working on some project or other, or jams a session on his drums, and she’s just finishing up college prep. She stays with him as much as time allows, but she also stays the course, and come autumn she goes off to college.

When she comes home on the first break, the kids are with their mother, and they end up making the most out of that time. She’s reasonably sure there is at least a twenty-four hour period where she never has any clothes on, streaking through the house buck naked for food or whatever else they might have needed. They’re both young; it’s allowed.

When the first year of college is up, and Alex’s nervousness starts growing into a cautious hope, they tell their friends. Their Jumanji friends, that is. (Her mother asks her conspiratorially about crushes, and Bethany tells her that she’s got a boyfriend, and that’s all she’s willing to divulge on the matter. Her mother is delighted with this piece of gossip as it is.)

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Martha asks bluntly.

Alex makes a complicated face, and Bethany squeezes his hand before he says something to agree that it isn’t.

“Can you imagine being with anyone who doesn’t know that part of you?” Bethany tells her instead, nodding significantly at Spencer.

“Whatever,” Fridge says. “Everybody’s pairing up, leaving me hanging.” He snorts, but then covertly winks at Bethany, and she loves him so much for being so smart.

——o——

Virginia arrives one day, unannounced. She doesn’t have a key, thank god, and waits appropriately at the door, but Bethany still feels like somebody is encroaching on somebody else’s territory here. Possibly her, even though she has every right to be here, she knows she does. But Alex had a life with this woman. And Bethany knows how she must look, they have always known how they would look; it makes her squirm.

She doesn’t care what people think, she told him, and she doesn’t. Their friends know, and the Parrishes know, and that’s enough. She doesn’t even care what her own parents would think. But she cares what Alex’s would think, because she doesn’t want to ruin it for him. Doesn’t want to ruin anything for him. Even his amicable relationship with his ex-wife.

She stands in the doorway, dumbstruck with fear, and stares at the woman, and tries to figure out a plan.

“I’m Virginia Meachem,” the woman says.

“Yes, I know,” Bethany says quickly. “Alex isn’t home yet,” she adds very carefully.

“That’s alright, I’ll wait,” Virginia says, stepping inside and hanging her coat. “How are the kids?” she asks cheerfully, walking inside towards the kitchen.

Bethany blinks at her, and doesn’t get it for a second; doesn’t get anything about this friendliness. Then it dawns on her. She thinks she’s the _help_. Girls her age earn money babysitting, or maybe cleaning, and that’s what she assumes this is. She doesn’t know if she should be relieved or mortified.

“I’m getting a few days off work, sort of a bonus,” Virginia’s telling her, “and I want to take the kids somewhere for some quality time, you know.”

Bethany nods, teetering nervously and checking her phone. “Tea? Coffee?” she says.

“Tea, if you would, please,” Virginia smiles at her. Bethany pulls out two mugs and wonders if that’s actually the white lie Alex _told_ his ex-wife, to explain that there is always someone to look after the kids these days. “Are you in college?” she asks.

“Third year,” Bethany says quietly. “On break now.”

“What are you studying?” Virginia asks. Or means to ask. Her voice trails off, recanting the question with its tone.

She’s been looking around the room, and, well. There are pictures now. Of course there would be pictures. She’s Bethany Walker, the Instagram queen, _of course_ there would be pictures. They aren’t hiding anything—technically. And she _is_ trying, still, day after day, to prove to Alex that she isn’t about to bail on him. So. There are pictures.

Virginia looks at Bethany. Bethany looks back at Virginia. Virginia stands up and walks to one of the photos, picks the frame up and studies it. It isn’t anything overt; one of their first dates, when he gave her flying lessons. They are just… _together_ there. In a way that you’re not with a babysitter. In a way that you _can_ be with a friend, but, Bethany is here, has opened the door, she knows this kitchen: so the ship on that assumption has also sailed.

The tea’s made. She places the mug on the table where Virginia has been sitting and backs away. “Maybe I should call him,” she says carefully. “See how long he’s gonna be.”

Virginia’s face changes, because yes, that’s smart, but now she has also flounced how domestic they are.

“Please. Do,” Virginia says icily.

——o——

Bethany hears the lock turn and wants to come out and meet him, but Virginia’s stare pins her to the chair. They both wait for him in the kitchen. Alex looks anxious walking through the door.

He nods at Bethany first, his eyes silently asking _Are you okay?_ She smiles at him reassuringly.

“Ginnie,” he greets his ex-wife.

“Alexander,” she says, stabbing him with his full name.

“I’m gonna go,” Bethany says quietly, rising.

“Beth,” he says quickly, catching her hand, and squeezing it just like he did the first time she stayed over at this house, like he’s afraid to let go.

“I’ll just be in the next room,” she whispers quietly to him. “This is a conversation for you and her, that’s all.”

He nods carefully, only half-reassured, and Bethany slips out of the room. The last thing she hears as she’s closing the door is Virginia hissing, “_Beth_? Did I hear that correctly? Alex, did you name our daughter after your teenage mistress? Was she even out of school then?”

Alex doesn’t want to lie to her—his ex-wife, his still-friend—but there is no way for him to explain to her the truth either. “I hadn’t planned on meeting her,” he says, which is honest enough.

Virginia is only slightly placated by the notion. “Honestly, Alex, out of all the people I have ever met you were always so genuine. That’s what I loved best about you. I would really think you would be above self-delusions and… and… mid-life crises.” She waves her hand angrily towards the door where Bethany disappeared to.

“She’s not a mid-life crisis, Gin,” he says tiredly.

“Well, what is she?”

Alex doesn’t know how to answer her. There isn’t any good word to define what they are to each other. She’s the love of his life.

“Does she live here?” Ginnie demands, as the silence stretches.

“Yes,” he says.

She shakes her head disbelievingly.

“For how long?”

“A while.”

“That’s who you’ve been leaving the kids with when you said you have someone to look after them, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Honestly, could you be any more cliché?”

“God, Gin, I didn’t hire her to babysit the kids and then got involved. I leave the kids with her _because_ we’re involved. Because she’s moved in.”

“Alex, how old even is she?”

He swallows. “Twenty-one.”

Ginnie groans. “Alex…”

“Well, what do you want from me?” he exclaims. “I wish to god she was older, or I was younger, and people wouldn’t look at us weird.”

“And with good reason,” Ginnie snaps. “I mean, Jesus, Alex, what did you expect? It’s not even the years, if you were fifty, and she was thirty, I’d think it was a little strange, but hey, if she says she loves you, she at least must mean it, she has a fully functional brain to know herself. But this is—She’s a _child_, Alex.”

“I know what you’re saying, Gin,” he says tiredly. “And maybe you’re right, and then you’ll tell me ‘I told you so,’ and I will tell myself ‘I told you so,’ but that’s my problem. It doesn’t change anything. I love her. I have _always_ loved her. I have loved that girl my whole life. Even as I met you, and even as I married you, and even as I loved you, I have loved that girl, and I know that doesn’t make any sense to you, but I can’t explain it any better. And it kills me that she’s this young, and things might change for her, but she’s the girl I love. And maybe she won’t love me forever, but I will love her forever.”

“Oh, Alex,” Virginia sighs, and goes up to him, and hugs him. “You’re making such a mistake.”

He lets himself be hugged, standing stiffly and not really feeling like answering.

——o——

It doesn’t get much easier with other people. With Virginia knowing, Alex’s side of the family soon learns that he has a scandalously young girlfriend, and introductions have to be made.

Bethany remembers Alex’s father a broken man, driven half-mad with grief over losing his son. Maybe it’s that knowledge that translates into a particular sort of fondness in her, or maybe it’s just how much she loves Alex, which shows, but Alex’s father takes kindly to her, at least. His wife doesn’t share in that approval.

Neither do her parents, when it’s their turn to find out.

Her father had a plan for his darling baby girl. That plan did not include a gap year, but he and his wife chalked it up to teen rebellion. Dating and marrying a divorced father of two, however? He is not on board.

“He’s trying to understand, Bethany,” her mother promises, when her husband stomps out of the room in a huff.

Bethany stays silent for a while, thinking. “What if dad was a different age?” she says eventually. “What if you met him when you met him, but he was the age he is now? Or vice versa, really? Would it make any difference, other than that people would look at you funny and presume to know anything about you? ‘Cause I don’t care what others think. I know myself, and I know that man, and I am going to marry him.”

They’ve made plans to leave early if things don’t go over too well, with a chance to stay over if they do. They don’t stay over.

“You okay?” he asks quietly, as they’re driving away.

She shrugs. “I wasn’t here to seek their approval. It wouldn’t change anything if they reacted positively, so it doesn’t change anything that they didn’t. We already know who we are. They can either accept, or it’s their loss.”

She squeezes his hand. She knows he’s worried, but they’ll wait them out.

——o——

The Christmas at the Parrishes is always a festive affair, and the five of them are always invited. Whatever else may be going on in their lives, they always find a way to intersect on a few chosen dates a year, and Christmas is always one of those times: the first time they all met, a special anniversary.

Bethany’s studying the wildlife case Alan has out in one of the rooms: authentic arrowheads, and historic weapons, an art collection of sorts.

“Do you ever miss it?” she asks, sensing Alex stepping up to her from behind. “The skills we had. The thrills?”

“Well,” Alex says slowly, setting his champagne glass on the table nearby and taking her hand into his. “I certainly don’t miss my wife being a portly older fellow.”

She laughs. He kisses her temple with a smile.

“But do you miss it?” she asks.

His hand runs over the ring on her finger. The one that says ‘The Missing Piece’ on the inside.

“I used to,” he says quietly. “I am not fully myself without you.”

She stands on tiptoes and has to kiss him for that. “I’m here,” she reminds him.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Yes, you are.”


End file.
